Posts in category OpenCourseWare
OE Global 2018: call for proposals opened
As you might have seen or heard, the Open Education Consortium and TU Delft will host OE Global 2018 conference at TU Delft Netherlands between 24 and 26 April 2018. We are exited to announce that the theme will be Transforming Education through Open Approaches. The website is now live and the call for proposals is now open.
“The Open Education Global Conference is where the world meets to discuss how opening education helps achieve universal access, equity, innovation and opportunity in education. The OE Global conference is the most internationally diverse conference devoted exclusively to open education, attracting researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators and students from more than 35 countries to discuss and explore how Open Education advances educational practices around the world.”
Call for proposals
The call for proposals enables you to submit proposals to offer ‘presentations‘, ‘panel sessions‘, ‘action labs‘ and ‘poster sessions‘, and there is a journal publication opportunity in the open access journal ‘Open Praxis’. Proposals need to fit tracks mentioned below. Learn more at http://conference.oeconsortium.org/2018/call-for-proposals/
Conference tracks:
- Open Connections
Connecting different worlds of Open, such as open access, open science, open source software; strengthening our reach and increasing impact through collaboration. - Open Education Research
Research on practices to mainstream openness in education; evidence of impact, studies of educational transformation using open modalities. - Innovation through opening traditional practices
MOOCs as an accelerator for open & online education, opening teaching practices through open textbooks, openly licensed student work as OER. - Policies & strategies for Open Education
Setting priorities and conditions for mainstreaming Open Education, designing effective policies and strategies, connecting open education policies to larger policy movements such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Open Government Partnership. - Institutionalizing Open Education
Intellectual property arrangements at schools and universities; reward and recognition systems; institutional conventions; disciplinary norms; types of in-service training for Open Education; impact on hiring practices; challenges and barriers for mainstreaming openness; openness as a tool for community outreach, enhancing leadership in open education. - Tools & Technologies for Open Education
Supporting the development and use of tools for OER production, hosting, use and remix, authoring OER, conventions for tagging OER, hosting derivative works, citation conventions for derivative works, standards for remixable formats. - Open Educational Practices/Open Pedagogy
New approaches to teaching and learning based on openness, personalization of education, OER-enhanced teaching, facilitating informal learning with open resources, course redesign with a focus on open. - Connecting Open Education to formal education
Accelerating adoption of open education, recognition and rewards for open education adoption, alignment of open education values to institutional mission, accreditation of open education, recognition of learning through open means. - Student perspectives
Student-led initiatives to advance open education and research, impact of open for students, student perceptions of open education, students as open education leaders.
Impressions OE Global 2017
The last day of the Open Education Global Conference has just gone past. So it is time to reflect on what I’ve learned those days. To start off, the conference took place in an amazing venue and the organization was very well done. Compliments to the organizers!
2017 is the year in which the Capetown Declaration of OER celebrated it’s 10th anniversary. For me, running towards the conference, this raised high expectations, expecting to see what the Open Education movement has accomplished since 2007 and to discuss what the future holds. And this did take part in the closing panel discussion on the last day of the conference, where many interesting new directions were discussed.
2 years ago, at the Open Education Global Conference in Banff, David Wiley made a plea for rethinking the movement. Back then, as I recall, he pointed out that the first period of the open movement was heavily aimed at creating and sharing OER. But although this ambition has been and still is very important, this should not be the end goal. In the end OER and Open Education are means to work towards actually transforming education, making it more accessible, more global, more effective (not only from the cost perspective) and more open. Thus, I remember him pleaing for thinking about the next step in the open education movement.
Moving from OER to Open Education in all its aspects, including MOOCs, has been an answer we saw happening already back then, two years ago.
But now, I think this year the community showed that we have listened. This year, both in the keynotes, in the research tracks, education tracks and policy presentations, such as Cable Green’s vision on next steps for Creative Commons, it struck me that Open Educational Practices and Pedagogy were central to many of the talks and discussions I participated in, or would liked to have participated in. Although definitions on these terms are still developing and so far hard to dot down – where David Wiley and Bronswyn Hegarty have already provided interesting (but not the only) viewpoints – the common ground of applying open aspects to education was clearly visible.
This provides an interesting starting point for the upcoming year. And with the current Year of Open promoting openness in all its facets, I have gotten quite excited about what is to come. Hopefully in the next year we will see not only a broader application of Open Educational Practices and Open Pedagogies, but also an expansion of our open values to collaborations with all other open fields, suchs as research, data, software, policy, etc.
It appearently proved hard to get to that point this year. Perhaps 2017 was just a bit to early and the Year of Open still needs some traction. The joint approach from open practices and pedagogy and broader cross collaborations on openness, might just hold the key to actually mainstreaming Openness in the fields we work for.
Let’s see where the movement is going. And let’s discuss more about this at the next Open Education global Conference, where we are incredibly honored to welcome you at Delft University of technology.
Toolkit Workshop Implementing Open Education
Last year Robert Schuwer and me developed a workshop to stimulate teachers to think about how to implement elements of open education in their daily educational practice. Based on the workshop we created a toolkit including all the documents we used, enabling you and others to build on and offer the workshop in your own context. We encourage you to use, adapt the toolkit and offer the workshop. And obviously we would love to hear your input!
We will present our experiences during Open Education Global in March 2017 and hope to see you there!
Below you’ll find Robert’s blog providing a bit more context (CC BY Robert Schuwer):
“Open educational resources, open online courses (eventually “massive”) and open tools like blog, twitter and open forums offer a potentially rich source to use in education. It enables active learning and a more tailor-made approach of education. When teachers are aware of the opportunities open online education can offer, they are able to make an informed choice to use them optimal when designing a course. To enable this, basic knowledge of the many manifestations of openness in education is needed. In the end, their range of teaching methods is enlarged.
To realize this, together with Martijn Ouwehand (Delft University of Technology) under the umbrella of the SURF SIG Open Education, we have developed a workshop targeted at teachers who are interested in applying forms of openness into their lectures.
The objectives of the workshop are to raise awareness of the opportunities of openness and how to integrate them to achieve the optimal learning experience for the students. Open educational practices offers a base to connect openness to the daily practice of a teacher; this workshop tries to give the ideas more flesh and blood.
The workshop offers two approaches of how to use forms of openness in course design:
- Reuse of open learning materials or open courses. This reuse can range from just reusing the idea behind a specific OER (not all 5R rights are necessary for this aim) to reusing reworked and remixed OER (all 5R rights are necessary)
- Expand openness to open tools and open platforms, using an open pedagogy. For this workshop we have adopted a revised version of the definition of open pedagogy by Hegarty.
This workshop was organized twice in 2016 under the umbrella of SURFacademy. Feedback from the participants was used to improve the resources of the workshop. This has resulted in a toolkit. The toolkit can be used by those interested in organizing this workshop in their own institution.
The toolkit consists of the following resources:
- A script. This contains all information needed to organize the workshop (available as .pdf, .docx and .odt)
- A course manual “Basics of open”. This manual is intended for self-study a basic course on openness in education (available as .pdf, .docx and .odt)
- Slides “Workshop Implementing open education”. These slides can be used in the workshop (available as .pptx)
- Two inspirational models.
All resources are published under a CC BY license. The toolkit is available in both Dutch and English and can be downloaded from here.
We intend to regularly update the toolkit, based on feedback of users. Feedback can be provided using this form.
We hope this workshop will add to widening adoption of forms of open online education by teachers.
Blog text CC BY SA Robert Schuwer: http://robertschuwer.nl/blog/?p=1435
Open Onderwijs: Stimuleringsregeling en workshop
Vandaag zijn zowel de stimuleringsregeling Open & Online Onderwijs als een workshop rondom de inzet van open leermiddelen in onderwijs gelanceerd.
Stimuleringsregeling Open & Online Onderwijs
Vandaag heeft het Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap een nieuwe ronde binnen de Stimuleringsregeling Open & Online Onderwijs gelanceerd. Het is goed om te lezen dat er deze keer meer aandacht lijkt te bestaan voor projecten waarin bestaande leermiddelen worden hergebruikt met als doel de kwaliteit en doelmatigheid van onderwijs te verhogen. Hiermee wordt het m.i. mogelijk de ware kracht van Open Onderwijs te laten zien. Projecten kunnen tot 15 december worden ingediend. Ben je geïnteresseerd in de mogelijkheden op dit gebied, lees dan nog even verder…
Workshop Open onderwijsvormen toepassen voor docenten en onderwijsondersteuners (22 augustus & 13 oktober)
Daarnaast organiseren Robert Schuwer (Fontys Hogeschool) en ik namens de Special Interest Group Open Education na het zomerreces een workshop, waarin we docenten willen ondersteunen om de kansen die open onderwijs biedt te benutten in het (campus)onderwijs, zoals (her)gebruik en aanpassing van bestaande leermiddelen en studenten in contact brengen met een open community middels activerende werkvormen. In de workshop informeren we de deelnemers over deze kansen en dagen we hen uit om deze kennis toe te passen in een eigen lesontwerp (met zogenaamde Open Educational Practices als resultaat). De workshop duurt maximaal 1 dag en wordt 2 keer aangeboden, namelijk op 22 augustus en 13 oktober, maar kent een maximum van 20 deelnemers per keer.
Deze workshop richt zich in eerste instantie op docenten die meer willen bereiken met het onderwijs dat zij verzorgen. Onderwijsondersteuners zijn natuurlijk ook welkom. Daarnaast zorgen we er ook voor dat de opzet en de materialen van de workshop beschikbaar komen, zodat onderwijsondersteuners de workshop zelf kunnen toepassen binnen de eigen instelling.
De workshop kan erg interessant zijn om je te oriënteren op de mogelijkheden van (her)gebruik van bestaande open leermiddelen, bijvoorbeeld in voorbereiding op de stimuleringsregeling Open & Online Onderwijs. Schrijf je dus snel in. het aantal plekken is beperkt.
Open Education global 2015
Two weeks ago, April 22-24, I attended the annual Open Education Global Conference in Banff, Alberta. I went there for a couple of reasons. It was a great opportunity to share out experiences at TU Delft Online Learning on Open & Online Education with the Open Education community, but also to experience the current status of Open Education Worldwide.
The things I did…
We started the conference on Tuesday, where Willem van Valkenburg and me offered a big part of the Pre Conference Workshop ‘Getting Started with Open Education – a crash course on starting an open education project’. It is always great to help other institutions get their projects going, based on our own experiences. I noticed that, in contrast to the same workshop we organised last year, the participants were a lot further in the process of starting up an open education project.
On Wednesday I shared our experience in how we handle(d) sublicensing our DelftX MOOCs while at the same time sharing our MOOC contents under an Open License. It was a tough nut to crack, but we managed. And I got quite some responses on my presentation as well, like:
“Though Provoking work fr @gouwehand in tension beta. revenue generation & Creative commons license i#MOOCs #oeglobal” – @fieldingGrasty
“Great Presentation from @Gouwehand on breaking down the open and non-open components that make up MOOCs #oeglobal” – @sunnywidmann
Lastly, I took part in the Action Lab on MOOCs, Where Willem shared our experiences with MOOCs.
And oh yeah, we we have been awarded no less then 3 Open Education Awards for Excellence, which make us proud! Unfortunately not all winners were able to attend the Award ceremony, but we will make sure that the awards will reach them – and give them (Alexander de Haan, Jaap Daalhuizen and David Abbink and their course teams) all the credit they deserve.
My key take aways
At first I found it hard to put my finger on what was the current state of affairs around Open Education. But now that the conference is over and there has been some time to reflect, I came up with four take aways from this year’s conference:
- As I mentioned last year, the Open Education movement seems to have reached a steady level of maturity. I’ve attended quite some presentations where the more advanced issues were tackled, like how to deal with self learners who want to earn college credits for open education achievements. There were not a lot of start up project presentations that I’ve seen. This is a good thing to notice, but does raise the question what’s next.
- ‘MOOC’ is no longer a dirty word to use in the Open Education Community. Last year the OpenCourseWare Consortium changed its name to Open Education Consortium, since the scope has changed worldwide. MOOCs back then were considered different, but now seem to have been embraced as one of the ways to empower learners to learn. Which is a good thing! Still, the ‘O’ which should stand for ‘Open’ is still a thing… ‘Open MOOCs’ seemed to be a normal term, which is odd. Still, the ‘O’ of Open is not easy, considering my presentation.
- There is a need for Open Education practices. I think during his keynote speech Dirk van Damme nailed the message, which is supported by David Wiley in his blog: Why do we want everyone to share there educational resources? And why do we feel a need to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute educational resources? It was all meant to support and empower learners to learn, learn more and in a better way. Perhaps we miss that part sometimes as we’re all busy in the process of getting to that point. But we shouldn’t forget what we’re doing it all for.
- At TU Delft Online Learning, we’re doing the right things, in the right way. I’m not the bragging type, but TU Delft Online Learning is doing something right. We’ve been awarded for 3 awards, with (after a raw count) brings us to 10 in total during the past 5 years the Open Education awards for Excellence have been issued. We showed that we have a lot of experience to share and that we have an organisation, vision and strategy to really make an impact.
Next year the conference will take place in Krakow, Poland. I wonder if we’ll be able to share or learn from experiences with Open Education Practices.
Blended Learning & Open Education?
Yesterday the Dutch E-Merge Consortium organized a Blended Learning Expert meeting, where all participants shared experiences on how they have implemented blended learning in their educational practice. The E-merge consortium consists of The Hague University of Applied Science, TU Delft, Leiden University and Leiden University of Applied Science. Two big Blended Learning Projects were presented: the E-Merge Blended Learning project and the TU Delft Blended Learning project).
Blended Learning definitions often adress the optimal mix of face-to-face and digital/online delivery of content and instruction in formal Brick and Mortar school structures. As you might expect, experiences shared were diverse in nature. In some cases Blended Learning was still limited to merely replacing knowledge transfer through live lectures by lecture video’s. This in itself is a nice start, since it often is a personal innovative experience for a lot of teachers.
But as I see it, blended learning projects provides teachers with the opportunity to go one step further and fully rethink how you can support your students in reaching the learning goals, by using the strengths of both different types of content, delivery methods and learning activities, be it either face-to-face or digital/online. The general opinion of the participants ultimately stretched this towards a more constructivist approach, where the new opportunities of digital and online content and delivery methods can be used in encouraging an active attitude in students, making education more engaging and giving control over the learning process back to students (control over time, place, path and pace – Wikipedia).
There is quit a similarity here with Open Education, where succesful usage is also based on non formal self directed learning. So, it might prove interesting to see if Open Educational Practices could be implemented in formal education. Scenario’s in which blended learning is applied, certainly provide good opportunity to achieve this. As long as students are really let go, given actual control over the learning process – even though this often lies outside many peoples comfort zone. And for many of the participants, although they agreed, this might still be a step to far. But they made/are making their first steps. And it is interesting to see where that might lead…
How can OER benefit formal learners?
As educators or (in my case) supporting staff in education, we are all ambitious in supporting our students to learn and excel in what they do. At the same time, every teacher I know has little spare time to design and create educational activities and (especially) materials which match these ambitions. Often it works, but in many cases we don’t have the time to create the materials we envisioned or we don’t really know how.
On the other hand, worldwide thousends of teachers in hundreds of universities have been sharing their educational materials on the Internet, openly available. Open in this case means anybody is free to use, re-use, remix, repurpose and redistribute the educational materials.
Given this fact, I became very curious in how we could (re-)use and repurpose these Open Educational Resourses in formal education settings in a way that benefits students in learning and developing the skills needed in today’s (21st century) society and could benefit teachers in reaching their ambitions as educators.
TU Delft STUMBLE
So we set up the TU Delft STUMBLE project. In this project we’d like to explore this -what I consider to be – interesting question. What I’ve noticed so far is that re-using Open Educational Resources others have shared on the Internet can benefit students in different extents, depending on the level of integration in education:
- simply offer Open Educational Resources as additions to contents covered in lectures provides nice extra’s for students, but seems to be the least effective: students are (and they have every right to) focussed on the course goals as addressed in the final course exams. And the teacher and his or her lectures and contents are key, not contents created by (perhaps top-class) teachers on any other university.
- Teachers can re-use Open Educational Resources shared by others to (up to a certain point) replace the contents he or she wanted to bring across in lectures or educational materials in stead of designing and creating them themselves. As long as students understand the teacher approves and advocates these materials and students know this is the content they will be tested on, this could work. It opens doors to my next point, and perhaps can save some time in respect of developing the course materials themselves.
- What I think could be most beneficial to students, is placing the initiative with students, giving them the lead in finding, judging and relating the contents of Open Educational Resources to the course goals. This way students are actively involved in the learning process and develop important 21st century (perhaps mostly metacognitive) skills.One interesting idea’s I got comes from one of our professors, Prof. Mr. Dr. Ir. Sicco Santema, where students are asked to find course materials related to topics covered in class and bring in arguments about how this relates to the taught subjects. But Youtube Fridays (Colorado School of Mines) and Flipped Classroom models like Peer Instruction (Prof. Eric Mazur, Harvard) offer potential in this respect as well.
Finding Open Educational Materials
We are not supposed to assume that any source Google delivers as a (default) search result allows you t0 re-use it. Copyrights may provide an obstacle: although the copyright protects the creator of content from others stealing or copying them illegally, it also prevents others from re-using them for educational purposes.
Then again, for more then a decade, universities worldwide have been sharing Open Educational Resources: educational resources anybody is allowed to re-use, remix, repurpose and redistribute freely as they please. This is because these educational materials have been published under a Creative Commons License, as legal exemptions on the copyright.
The more educational resources become available, the harder it can be to find the exact resources you’re looking for and allow you to re-use them. So a nice list of (good!) search engines for Open Educational Resources seems in order. I’m sure others have already found many more (like Willem van Valkenburg and SURF (trend report, both pdf: 2012, p. 39; 2013, p. 103), but here’s a shortlist I know is interesting.
- OCW Search: find over 2000 courses from 10 universities
- OERCommons
- OCW Finder
- OER Dynamic Search
- Google OCW
- Wikiwijs (Mainly Dutch content and mainly secondary education level)
- Kahn Academy
- search.creativecommons.org: focussed on multimedia
Please don’t hesitate to bring in more (and better) if you know them, by commenting on this blog. But if you do, please add why you think your suggestions are great ones 😉
OpenCourseWare Seminar 2011
Op Dinsdag 1 november is het weer zover! Net als in 2009 vindt er dit jaar weer een OpenCourseWare Seminar plaats, in de Snijderszaal van de faculteit EWI dit keer (van 14:00 – 18:00 uur).
Tijdens het Seminar zullen onze docenten presenteren hoe ze OpenCourseWare hebben ingezet om het bereik van hun onderwijs te vergroten. Daarnaast zullen mijn OCW-collega’s vertellen wat de toekomst brengt voor OpenCourseWare en iTunes U. Ten slotte zal onder andere Rector Magnificus Karel Luyben en aantal speciale aankondigingen doen, tijdens het Seminar. Het complete programma kun je vinden via http://ocw.tudelft.nl/open2011
Dat zou je niet willen missen! Schrijf je daarom nu in (gratis) via http://ocw.tudelft.nl/open2011/register!
Of kijk tijdens het seminar live mee, via http://ocw,tudelft.nl/open2011/live! Meediscussieren via twitter kan dan ook via #tudocw
Zie ik je daar?
Een kwestie van kwaliteit of van verwachtingen…?
Per toeval kwam ik via @ambervanwalraven bij dit stukje terecht. Studenten zouden volgens het artikel de mogelijkheid moeten krijgen om collegegeld terug te krijgen als de kwaliteit van het onderwijs niet voldoet aan de verwachtingen.
Wat ik me afvroeg tijdens het lezen was of het nu echt over de kwaliteit van het onderwijs gaat, of over de verwachtingen van studenten daarover. Op basis waarvan beoordelen studenten de kwaliteit van het onderwijs? En waar komen die verwachtingen vandaan? Komen die voort uit de voorlichting van opleidingen naar studenten toe? Of ontwikkelen studenten zelf (verkeerde?) verwachtingen?
Ik vraag me ook af welke rol een accreditatiecommissie van de NVAO in dit kader speelt. Alle hoger onderwijsinstellingen worden immers regelmatig getoetst op kwaliteit. Is het echt zo slecht gesteld met de kwaliteit van het NL Hoger Onderwijs?
Ik denk dat dat wel meevalt. Dat wil niet zeggen dat studenten de kwaliteit van het onderwijs niet goed kunnen beoordelen. En ik denk ook dat hun mening erg belangrijk is. De maatregel die wordt voorgesteld, klinkt dan ook best aardig. Al vraag ik me af of dit daadwerkelijk iets op gaat leveren. Hoe ga je als student hard maken dat het feit dat jouw verwachtingen niet worden waargemaakt toe te schrijven is aan de kwaliteit van het onderwijs?
Naar mijn idee gaat het niet eens zozeer om een dergelijke maatregel, maar gaat het in dit kader om goede, realistische voorlichting. Dat haal ik onder andere uit:
"Studenten, de onderwijsinspectie en ook politici spreken zich negatief uit over hoe het gaat bij sommige instellingen in het hoger onderwijs en willen dat studenten het onderwijs krijgen dat ze beloofd wordt."
Zorg nou dat studenten geen verkeerde verwachtingen ontwikkelen over wat ze kunnen verwachten van een studie. Bied een realistisch inkijkje in het onderwijs en laat studenten de kwaliteit beoordelen, ook wanneer ze de colleges zelf niet volgen of zelfs nog niet ingeschreven zijn.
De TU Delft publiceert haar onderwijsmateriaal bijvoorbeeld vrij toegankelijk op http://ocw.tudelft.nl voor een heel aantal Masterprogramma’s. Daarnaast richten wij ons ook steeds meer op Bachelorvakken. Zo hebben we recentelijk een Introductiecursus Technische Bestuurskunde gepubliceerd, waarmee met name studenten en vwo-scholieren in korte tijd direct een beeld van het Bachlorprogramma kunnen volgen. Hieraan kunnen studenten hun verwachtingen spiegelen en kunnen ze de kwaliteit van het onderwijs deels mee aantonen.
Als de tweede kamer nadenkt over maatregelen om studenten de kwaliteit van onderwijs te laten toetsen, zouden ze dergelijke initiatieven daar dan niet in mee moeten nemen…? Laat weten wat je ervan vindt en praat dan mee binnen de SURF Special Interest Groep Open Educational Resources!